NOTE: This is the first thing I've posted here in ages. Submitting it now is strangely refreshing. Anyway, please don't hold back on this one. Rip it apart. Hate it and drag it through the mud and back again. Tell me if you hate the style. I'd be especially interested to know if this would catch your eye as a novel's opening. Just please be honest.
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“Spin her around,” they might have said. “Go on, dizzy up the girl.” Whatever the truth, those are the words which have stayed in your head. They first sought out your mind in the hospital room and they congealed there during the hours spent running your eyes over every broken patient, broken nurse; broken vending machine. Now you are not sure, never were sure, that the words were said at all. In fact you know that they were not. But on the nights when your girl breaks out screaming (every night) and you wipe the sweat from her pale head (and your wife, she goes to cradle your half-waking boy) these are the first words that come to you. First words on the pink tongue. They bring some kind of peace to you. Like the words ringing hollow from the lips of the local preacher man with all their religious gauze. Listen to me sinner or die, they say, but you say that you have already died.
The next time you leave the house on your own (after the single month which has extended itself like the hands of God to you all) the world is greyer than it once was before. Like the aftermath of a long war in whose wake only ash and an encroaching sense of death remain. You are looking for life of some sort, some empty echo of happiness to resume a broken social order, but death’s hands have run out ahead of you. In the early morning half-light of the late risen sun and the shadows of streetlamps, your street is perfectly monochrome. A perfect painter’s chiaroscuro of black and white, complemented by the odd dash of grey. You turn to go back inside, but your boy has woken and he looks at you with your own eyes. Trains, he says. Trains, you tell him, are not running today. But he has your eyes and it is in his knowledge when you lie. Trains, he says again, and within the hour it is you and your boy walking the roads of a town you no longer know.
Your boy is quiet on the journey out. You are taking him to London. He watches beads of concentration bleed down the tawny windowpane. The solemnity of the winter sweeping over your home has stifled him, caught his natural temperament and thrown away the key. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see him speaking under his breath in the way you do yourself. Moving his lips like a redemption-seeking man in prayer. You are about to tell him to stop, but then he looks at you and asks you if his sister will be okay. You pretend not to have heard, and facing the windowpane across you watch the condensation bleeding down the window.
Travelling to London to see Clark. Grey city and loud grey people and nothing much to see that you have not already seen. The gnarled and dead landmarks of a former thought-great Empire and then wraithlike creatures who are cursed to be its denizens. Forever and they do not know it. When you get to the office the boy goes to sit in the waiting room, flipping through the magazines. He looks bored and thoroughly uninterested and you don’t know what to do so you leave him and retreat to the front desk.
The receptionist is short and thin with bear-brown eyes and a naked grin. She is new, because she smiles at you, even as you frown and spit the words from your mouth: ‘David Clark. Fool in the suit. Floor Two.’
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